node.js ko
Rosa Wu
Rosa is a product manager at Erly. Prior to graduating from Stanford GSB in June, she was a product manager at Google through the Postini acquisition.
Votes (11)
You've hit on an interesting area of collaboration that has not been solved yet. There are some specific use cases where this could be very cool, but it would require additional hardware for it to go beyond a novelty product. The design needs a lot of work though.
I like the overall industry. You have put a lot of work put into building out a ton of functionality - kudos on that. However, if you want to be a company that helps build simple and beautiful websites, the site you present also has to be simple and beautiful. The main page has these qualities, but the editing experience is neither unfortunately. Also, I think WYSIWYG is table stakes - you will need to figure that out since the competition is already there.
hugow
contestantNow don't take this personally. I have received so bad reviews for this that I've decided to park the open source project that is at the core of GuloStudio and move to something else. This means, ditch 9 months of full time work not only on an editor but all what's needed to support it, and accept a full time job (yesterday).
I don't fully understand all the comments. Some tell me it is not wyssiwyg (but it is !?!?), some tell me it just does not work, but our whole site was created with it etc. This does not really matter though. The thing is obviously not perfect and needs improvement (and it is extremely difficult to balance 'easy to learn' 'easy to use' and 'powerful once you get used to it'... and now I definitely think I failed at that), but I perceived the feedback to this as being sooo bad, that you know, this improvement will probably never happen!
I'm not angry, believe me, I'm overwhelmed and sad. I just wanted to leave a trace of what all this means to me.
Thanks Hugo
It has never been so fun to cheat before. Hope you don't mind if I continue to use this. FYI not all of the words were dictionary words - the top one was not accepted by Letterpress. That said, I bet you could make money just releasing this into the market the way it is. I look forward to updates!
alexindigo
contestantThank you Rosa. Yep, their dictionary is very "unusual" still figuring out where it came from. :) (I'm using standard unix dictionary file).
I'm thinking of opensourcing it after the contest, so you're welcome to contribute/market it :)
Simple, clear, yet fun goal - nice work. Would love to see more.
Cool party trick
Good job on a great end to end experience. I opened the game in two different browsers bc I didn't have a friend handy and the two videos were pretty synced. Although the startup time to get to the game was kind of annoying.
I have a soft spot for movie trailers so it was pretty fun for me. Overall though, I think that you'll want to enhance this with something that adds value for the user to ensure engagement. Would also be nice to have a single-player mode.
This is a very cool web-based implementation of device/screen pairing - great idea. Getting the graphics perfectly aligned with the motion seems kind of difficult to implement well though. I would encourage you to take a look at other utility use cases besides gaming that have multiple "controllers" and might not necessarily need a screen (ie a group of people voting, splitting a payment, etc). The pairing was relatively simple, though I would imagine that you would want some way to more permanently tie the device to the game.
I'm a big fan of the location-based public message board idea. The idea could turn out so many different ways, and your implementation is very simple and clean. Congrats on a well-executed project within a larger vision of local community.
Pivotal Tracker is a great tool, but the main obstacle that I hear that prevents mass adoption is that it's too complicated and requires too much metawork (work to do work). While the concept of gaming the estimating process is pretty novel, this only creates more work unfortunately and defeats the primary purpose of using Pivotal - saving time.
It looks like there was a good amount of work that went into the design, but the flows are confusing for a first-time user. Think about areas where you help guide the user through the steps they need to take more - ie creating games and understanding how they interact with stories.
The idea is pretty simple and targeted, but is way narrow to be a big idea.
Need to develop an asynchronous case - it will be hard to grow if you limit usage to requiring simultaneous users. There might be interesting things you can do around curated streams from the past. But you will need to find some differentiation from the activity stream already present in Rdio.
Very limiting to tie yourself to Rdio only. Granted there might not be other music startups that have an api.
Also, I wasn't able to demo the full experience since I signed in with my personal Rdio account and then couldn't log out again to use the special login you had created.
sean-j-williamson
contestant@rosawu thanks very much for your thoughts. We are taking everything under advisement since we want to continue building this out. We have some thoughts in the pipeline on asynchronous listening, so please keep on checking in on our progress! We are looking into adding other services as well. You can keep track of our progress by following us on Twitter at @eavesdropio . Thanks again!
elskwid
contestantrosawu, Sorry you had problems. The technical issue, logging out, is actually a limitation of rdio. They do not give us a way to log you out through the api. You can visit http://rdio.com/signout to do that. (We found that pretty strange and asked them about it during development.)
Narrow focus was absolutely our intention, particularly in a 48 hour competition. We felt that it was critical to our success to limit ourselves.
The asynch case is handled pretty well by Rdio already - playlists, listening history, heavy rotation. Eavesdrop is (currently) a very thin slice on top of what Rdio provides. The critical component for us, and we think it's the key differentiator, is the synchronicity of the experience. There is something cool about listenting at the same time.
The limiting factor is if none of your friends is online. To combat that we've discussed a global "who's active now list" that would give you people to eavesdrop on, or a list similar to Rdio's "Suggested Users".
Anyway, thanks for giving us such thoughtful feedback. It is greatly appreciated.
The novelty of the demo is neat but I'm most excited about the potential of the platform.